This
morning everyone on Facebook is talking only of David Bowie, who died
yesterday. I’ve yet to see people so much of one mind before. His life of
public self-reinvention means there will be mourners for each of his many,
glamorous, sometimes androgynous selves.
Writing anything more than
tweets is still hard for me. It did not get easier last year, even with the deadline
regular blog posts. It was only a resolution I had made. By the end of the year
I was digging up and revising old things, just to meet the deadline, or miss it
by a day. This year seems to have started without me; I’ve barely sat down to
write.
My
corner of Westchester is tamed and tended but craggy with low, tree-hairy
hills. Between those bristling prominences are noisy valleys of highway or silent
reservoirs that slake the thirst of New York City, downstream. Jagged rocks the
size of houses lurk in the forest and make appearances shouldering the roads.
The trees are bare because it’s January, though we’ve yet to have any of the
deep cold of last year. I think the trees here are mostly oak and maple and
beech, but there are also black birches and shagbark hickory and sycamore.
There are eastern pines and hemlocks, and a kind of spruce I’m not sure about.
If I can name some of the trees, I feel like I should name the boulders and geologic
forces that put them there, but I can’t.
It
is the same way with the sky.
I
like the sky. I know it. I see it every day. I look at what color it is.
Sometimes it is prison gray. Other times it is bright blue. I look at the sky
and notice the sunlight, or the clouds. I know the dotty tide of clouds that
signal a change in weather, and recognize the looming of a storm cloud. But I
don’t know the names of clouds, just like I don’t know the rocks.
I’ve
wasted much of my adulthood not knowing clouds and being ignorant about rocks.
I can tell the downy from the red-bellied woodpeckers in my yard, and the
eastern red cedar from a hemlock tree, but all last year I took pictures of
clouds and never once in 77 Tumblr posts did I find out what sort of clouds
they were.
I drive from the new house
to the new barn almost every day, winding through the reservoirs. Some of the
shallower, more protected corners of the water are frozen over, so the mute
swans have congregated in flocks in still-open waters. They are big and white
and more likely to be floating than flapping their great wings and rising into
flight. From the distance of the road, they look harmless and decorative as
marshmallows floating in the gray-black cocoa water. The waters are all theirs.
The state lists them as an invasive species.
On the coldest mornings,
the sun is brilliant in the east, illuminating the trees still white with frost
and enticing the open water to expel a layer of mist rising like flames of fog.
I feel connected to my past by a strong, thin line on a map, and look forward
to the friendly mist of calm of the new barn.
I like the new barn. I am
making friends. I am learning a lot. I am one of the newer clients and the most
inexperienced dressage rider. I timidly contact the barn manager about
scheduling changes, apologizing for ordinary requests so much that I embarrass
myself. I still feel like I’m in other people’s way when I ride in the ring. My
horse stumbled and almost face-planted one day and I felt like I scared
everyone. Saturday I got bucked off my young horse, about whose freshness I had
been careless; though I was unhurt, as I walked across the ring to get the
naughty gelding from the spot where he halted square, reins wrapped around his
neck, looking astonished and guilty, I have never more keenly felt my awkward new
kid status.
When I got home, I found
my husband on the driveway with the dogs. I parked and joined them. We walked
around the yard talking and thinking about future plans. All of Mrs.Gardenwinkle’s original landscaping is now 30 years old and mature. Stopping by
the three large evergreens by the driveway, we mulled over the relative merits
of planting more evergreens near the property line. I looked up into the tree
closest to me, a cedar, and could see a length of broken Christmas lights, at
least ten feet up. I stopped listening to my husband and traced the broken
strands of lights all the way around the tree.
The
next day when the rain stopped we went out to walk the dogs and right when we
got back in the house the sky opened up with an onslaught of heavy rain flowed
by hail. The light-filled kitchen was lit a surreal green. Our youngest came
downstairs, uncharacteristically excited to get us outside to look at the sky. We
followed, and saw a bright rainbow arced over the woods below our house, and
behind us, the sun, setting in a now-clear royal blue sky.
I
came in and got ready to take a shower. Checking Facebook, I saw that my old Seattle
friends were all reacting to some sort of football kick. My new barn friends
were posting their shots of the rainbow.
